Going to the beach

Be gone a week to the coast of North Carolina with 
my family and some of my siblings.  Taking a stack of books, beach chairs, handwork, journals, and food. Lots of the last word! About to enter some timelessness with no computer but we will surely watch the Olympics! 

 

Queen's Jubilee for a Friend

Photos here from a coffee birthday for friend and 
another friend just back from 5 weeks in England.
All to get you in the mood for the Summer Olympics!

 

monday in the garden

Isn't that beautiful?!

I worked pulling weeds this morning and trimming the bushes and then it got hot! My vegetables are at a stand still.  Maybe it is the heat. The herbs are doing very well.
How's your garden?

Ann interview

Hoping to watch this later today:

Short interview here. 

What do you do when you encounter what's called "writer's block?" When I do it's important to be reading—three or four different books at a time, so those books begin to have a conversation with each other. Then I begin to engage what that conversation is about, and words come out. If I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough. I read mostly nonfiction, classics, a lot of C.S. Lewis, contemporaries, John Piper ... a lot of theology because I'm trying to figure out how to make theology very practical, for the kitchen sink, for the moms with a lot of young babies. 


Thanks Podso!

Tender

Great title of the cookbook that I just picked up at the library:

Tender: A cook and his vegetable patch by Nigel Slater   

 See his beautiful website of a cook who writes.
I am taken in by the first paragraph and the layout and photos of where he lives in England:

I keep lists. Some copied into notebooks in neat italic script in blue-black ink, others scribbled almost illegibly in soft pencil on the back of an old envelope. Most remain in my head. There is the usual inventory of things I need to do, of course, but also less urgent lists, those of books to read or read again, music to find, plants to secure for the garden, and letters to be written (few of which will ever see the light of day). One list that has remained in my head is that of favorite scents, the catalogue of smells I find particularly evocative or uplifting. Snow (yes, I believe it has a smell), dim sum, old books, cardamom, beeswax, moss, warm pancakes, a freshly snapped runner bean, a roasting chicken, a fleeting whiff of white narcissi on a freezing winters day. 


Also picked up this book  which makes me think of Melissa:

Masala Farm, Recipes and Tales From an Uncommon Life in the Country by Suvir Saran with Raquel Pelzel and Charlie Burd  Chronicle Books, September 2011

subtitle: IN which a city boy from India  meets country farm in Upstate New York and has many culinary adventures

Emma is cooking from this cookbook tonight. I've a few favorites from it:

 
Heidi's blog: 101 Cookbooks

Almost driving!

Today is Emma's 15th birthday. Just back from a trip to 
IKEA and heading to the mall in a bit. We are spending the day together!

She is named for this character:

Here  she is: The Path Less Traveled that was entered into a photo contest for SCAD by a friend.Hannah took the photo in the fall on our street.

Happy 15th!
Halfway done with Driver's Ed for your learner's permit. 
YIKES!

Summer days

Back in town and thinking of the beach in a few weeks. 

 

I

Just one post this week.......

This is a diary sort of entry: going to Franklin, Tenn. to hear Dr. George Grant talk on
Reading and the fast pace technological age we are in. So a new kind of Reading?

No, books. Hope to get to the Rabbit Room   and Parnassus Books. Here is something from  Ann Patchett's blog: ( author, reader, and book seller)

One last thing - I memorized the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V this month. It was a great adventure. I hadn’t tried to memorize Shakespeare since high school and I definitely found the Shakespeare receiving part of my brain to be in great disrepair. But once I finally got it I felt incredibly proud of myself. Brain calisthenics! I told my friend Jim Fox about my project (he had just sent me Harold Bloom’s book, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, which he says is worth the effort, though I personally have not made the effort yet)..

A bonus : newlyweds live along the way as we go over the mountains and through the woods of I-40 into the neighboring state! ...

Organizing

Taking ideas:

Freedom ... word for the 4th

We are all going around with COLDPLAY songs buzzing in our heads. We went to see their concert last night.  Fabulous. Not too old for this yet!!!! Amazing graphics and lighting and butterflies that came down from the sky. Reminds me Gretchen's Butterflies from Refractions.
 

I should send that essay to the band! 

On another note, I never really saw the ? marks in The Star Spangle Banner lyrics. 

Maybe there was question as to what the batttle outcome would be:

O say can you see by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Any thoughts?

 

Another stack

plus reading more of Marilynne Robinson's essays:

 plus reviewing this book for a curriculum:

Back in town

We did eat at Barbara Kingsolver's The Harvest Table
yesterday. No sign of her but great local food. 

  
This was after the Living Books Library's: Homeschool  Library Conference.  I am filled and nourished again. 
 after this time.

New books to read. Stacks. 
Kitchen wallpaper is being peel and scraped off.
Two layers. 
Honing in on a new look. 
So thankful.